THE SOUTH, i82o-i5;o 



l^v 



FREDERICK J.^ TURNER 



REPRINTED FROM THE 



gtmmcan ^ij^tariat %mm 



VOL. XI., NO. 3 



APRIL, ic)c6 



- O ! ■^S' 






OJVy^JLr^. . "^ oA, • PjUf 



[Reprinted from The American IIistoricai. Rkview, \oI. XL, No. 3, April, 19C6.] 



THE SOUTH, 1820^1830 

In the years between 1820 and 1830 no section underwent more 
far-reaching^ changes than did the South Atlantic group of states, 
made up of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Then 
it was that the South learned the full significance of the westward 
spread of the cotton-plant.^ 

The invention of the cotton-gin by Eli \\'hitney- in 1793 made 
possible the profitable cultivation of the short-staple variety of cotton. 
Before this the labor of taking the seeds by hand from this variety, 
the only one suited to production in the uplands, had prevented its 
use ; thereafter it was only a question of time when the cotton area, 
no longer limited to the tide-water region, would extend to the 
interior, carrying slavery with it. This invention came at an oppor- 
tune time. Already the inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and 
Cartwright had worked a revolution in the textile industries of Eng- 
land, by means of the spinning-jenny, the power-loom, and the fac- 
tory system, furnishing machinery for the manufacture of cotton be- 
yond the world's supply.^ 

Under the stimulus of this demand for cotton, year by year the 
area of slavery extended toward the west. In the twenties many o£ 
the southern counties of Virginia were attempting its cultivation'' ,' 
interior counties of North Carolina were combining cotton culture 
with their old industries ; in South Carolina the area of cotton and 
slavery had extended up the rivers well beyond the middle of the 
state*; while in Georgia the cotton-planters, so long restrained by the 
Indian line, broke through the barriers and spread over the newlv- 
ceded lands. 

' This article is based upon a chapter from the author's forthcoming Rise of 
the New West, American Nation Series. 

* American Historical Review, III. 99. 

* M. B. Hammond, The Cotton Industry, part I. (American Economic .\ssoci- 
ation, 1897), chaps, i. and 11.; Harry Hammond, "Culture of Cotton," in The 
Cotton Plant (United States Department of Agriculture. 1896) ; Ernst von 
Halle, Baumwollproduktion. part I., in Schinoller's Slaats- und Social^cissen- 
schaftliche Forschuttgen, Band XV., part i. (1897). 

* Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention of 18^9-1830 
(Richmond, 1830), pp. 333, 336; Joseph Martin, Gazetteer of Virginia and the 
District of Columbia (Charlottesville, 1835), 99. 

5 William A. Schaper, " Sectionalism and Representation in South Carolina " 
(Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1900, I.), 387-393. 

6 Ulrich B. Phillips, "Georgia and State Rights" (Annual Report of the 
American Historical Association for 1901, H.), 140 (map). 

(559) 



560 J^-J- Turner 

The table exhibiting the progress of 'he cotton crop printed in the 
January number of the Review^ shows the rapidity with which this 
plant increased. 

Tide-water South Carolina and Georgia produced practically all 
of the cotton crop in 1791, and the total was but two million pounds. 
By 1 82 1 the South Atlantic states produced one hundred and seven- 
teen million pounds; and five years later, one hundred and eighty 
millions. But how rapidly in these five years the Southwest gained 
on the older section is shown by its total of over one hundred 
and fifty millions. What had occurred was a repeated west- 
ward movement : the cotton-plant first spread from the sea-coast to 
the uplands, and then, by the beginning of our period, advanced to 
the Gulf Plains, until that region achieved supremacy in its produc- 
tion. 

How deeply the section was interested in this crop, and how 
influential it was in the commerce of the United States, appears from 
the fact that in 1820 the domestic exports of South Carolina and 
Georgia had amounted to $15,215,000, while the value of the do- 
mestic exports for all the rest of the United States was $36,468,000. ^ 
This, however, inadequately represents the value of the exports from 
these two cotton states, because a large fraction of the cotton was 
carried by the coastwise trade to northern ports, and appeared in 
their shipments. Senator William Smith of South Carolina esti- 
mated that in 1818 the real exports of South Carolina and Georgia 
amounted to " more than half as nnich as that of the other state? 
of the Union, including the vast and fertile valley of the Missis 
sippi ".-^ 

Never in history, perhaps, was an economic force more influential 
upon the life of a people. As the production of cotton increased, 
the price fell, and the Seaboard South, feeling the competition of the 
virgin soils of the Southwest, saw in the protective tariff for the 
development of Northern manufactures the real source of her dis- 
tress. The price of cotton was in these years a barometer of South- 
ern prosperity and of Southern discontent. 

* American Historical Review, XI. 318; the totals given in this paper 
are based on the figures of McGregor, instead of on those of the table taken 
from De Bow's Reviezv. 

2 Pitkin, Statistical Viezv (edition of 1835), 57. 

3 Speech in the United States Senate, April 11, 1828. 

* M. B. Hammond, The Cotton Industry, part I., appendix i, gives the 
average New York prices of middling upland cotton. See also E. J. Donnell. 
Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton (1872), and James L. Watkins. 
Production and Price of Cotton for One Hundred Years (United States Depart- 
ment of Agriculture, 1895). 



The South, jS2o-iSjo 561 

Even more important than the effect of cotton production upon 
the prosperity of the South was its effect upon her social system. 
This economic transformation resuscitated slavery from a moribund 
condition to a vigorous and aggressive life. Slowly X'irginia and 
North Carolina came to realize that the burden and expense of 
slavery, as the labor system for their outworn tobacco-fields and 
corn-fields, was partly coimtcracted by the demand for their surplus 
negroes in the cotton-fields of their more southern neighbors. 
When the Lower South accepted the system as the basis of its 
prosperity and its society, the tendency in the states of the Upper 
South to look upon the institution as a heritage to be reluctantly 
and apologetically accepted grew fainter.^ The efforts to find some 
mode of removing the negro from their midst came slowly to an 
end, and they adjusted themselves to slavery as a permanent system. 
[Meanwhile South Carolina and Georgia found in the institution the 
source of their economic well-being, and hotly challenged the right 
of other sections to speak ill of it or meddle with it in any way 
lest their domestic security be endangered. 

When the South became fully conscious that slavery set the sec- 
tion apart from the rest of the nation, wdien it saw in protection to 
manufactures and the construction of a system of internal improve- 
ments the efforts of other sections to deprive the cotton states of their 
profits for the promotion of an industrial development in which they 
did not share, deep discontent prevailed. With but one intermission 
from the days of Washington to those of Monroe, Virginia planters 
had ruled the nation. But now. at the same time that power within 
the section passed from the hands of \'irginia to those of South 
Carolina, the aggressive leader of the Cotton Kingdom, the South 
found itself a threatened and minority section. When it realized 
this, it denied the right of the majority to rule, and proceeded to 
elaborate a system of minority rights as a protection against, the 
forces of national development, believing that these forces threatened 
the foundations of the prosperity and even the social safety of the 
South.2 

From the middle of the eighteenth century the seaboard planters 
had been learning the lesson of control by a fraction of the popula- 
tion. The South was by no means a unified region in its physiog- 
raphy. The Blue Ridge cut off the low country of Virginia from 
the Shenandoah Valley, and beyond this valley the Alleghenies sepa- 

'Jeffer-son, Writings (Ford's edition), X. 173, 178; Niles' Register. XVII. 
363 ; J. S. Bassett, Auti-slavery Leaders of North Carolina, in Johns Hopkins 
University Studies, XVI. 

2 The most efi'ective statements of this attitiule arc : John Taylor, Ne^v 
Views of the Constitution (Washington, 1823), 261; and Drutus [R. J. Turnlmll], 
The Crisis (Charleston, 1827). 



562 F.J. Turnei" 

rated the rest of the state from those counties which we now know 
as West Virginia. By the time of the Revokttion, in the Carolinas 
and Georgia a belt of pine barrens, skirting the " fall line " from 
fifty to one hundred miles from the coast, divided the region of 
tide-water planters from the small farmers of the up-country. This 
interior population entered the region in the course of the second 
half of the eighteenth century. Scotch-Irishmen and Germans 
passed down the Great Valley from Pennsylvania into Virginia, and 
through the gaps in the Blue Ridge out to the Piedmont region of 
the Carolinas, while contemporaneously other streams from Charles- 
ton had advanced to meet them. Thus at the close of the eighteenth 
century the South was divided into two contrasted types of civiliza- 
tion. On the one side were the planters, raising their staple crops of 
tobacco, rice, and indigo, together with some cultivation of the 
cereals. To this region belonged the slaves. On the other side was 
the area of small farmers, raising livestock, wheat, and corn under 
the same conditions of pioneer farming as characterized the interior 
of Pennsylvania. 

This interior area, made up of the Great Valley and the Pied- 
mont of the South, is a neglected region. It may be named the Old 
West, for here first developed the conditions characteristic of the 
West, and the social, economic, and political antagonisms between 
the coast and the interior. The historians of the separate Southern 
states appreciate this differentiation in the states of which they 
write; but the real significance of the region lies in the fact that 
it was an interstate area, with a striking homogeneity and commu- 
nity of interest, in opposition to the East. 

From the period of the so-called War of the Regulation in 
1 771 down to the third decade of the nineteenth century there 
was a persistent struggle between the planters of the coast (who 
controlled the wealth of the region) and the free farmers of the in- 
terior. The tide-water counties retained the political power which 
they already possessed before this tide of settlement flowed into the 
back-country. Refusing to reapportion the legislature on the basis 
of numbers, they protected their slaves and their wealth against the 
dangers of a democracy that was interested in internal improve- 
ments and capable of imposing a tax upon slave property in order 
to promote its own ends.^ In Virginia in 1825, for example, the 

^Proceedings and Debates of the Virginia State Convention, 1829-1830; 
Johns Hopkins University Studies, XIV. 277, 280, 289 ; XVI. 267-269 ; XVII. 
324-325 ; Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1894, PP- 
144 et seqq.; ibid., 1900, I. 277, 435; ibid., 1901, II. 87-89, 104-106; Elliot's 
Debates, IV. 288, 296-299, 305, 309, 312; Jefferson, Writings (Ford's edition), 
III. 222 ; John P. Branch Historical Papers, II. 100. 



The South, 1S20-18JO 563 

western men complained that twenty counties in the upper country, 
with over two hundred and twenty thousand white inhabitants, had 
no more weight in the government than twenty counties on tide- 
water, containing only about fifty thousand; that the six smallest 
counties in the state, compared with the six largest, enjoyed nearly 
ten times as much political powcr.^ To the gentlemen planters of 
the seaboard the idea of falling under the control of the interior 
farmers of the South seemed intolerable. It was only as slavery 
spread into the interior, with the cultivation of cotton, that the low- 
lands began to yield, and to permit an increased power in the legis- 
latures to the sections most nearly assimilated to the seaboard type. 
South Carolina achieved this end in 1808 by the plan of giving 
to the seaboard the control of one house, while the interior held the 
other ; but it is to be noted that this concession was not made until 
slavery had pushed so far up the river-courses that the reapportion- 
ment preserved the control in the hands of slaveholding counties.'^ 
A similar course was followed by \'irginia in the convention of 
1829-1830. when after a long struggle a compromise was adopted by 
which the balance of power in the state legislature was transferred 
to the counties of the Piedmont and the Valley.^ Here slaveholding 
had progressed so far that the interest of those counties \n as affiliated 
rather with the coast than with the trans-Allegheny country. West 
Virginia remained a discontented area until her independent state- 
hood in the days of the Civil War. These transmontane counties of 
Virginia were in their political activity during our period rather 
to be reckoned with the West than with the South. 

Thus the southern seaboard had experienced the need of protect- 
ing the interests of its slaveholding planters against the free democ- 
racy of the interior, and had learned how to safeguard the minority 
within the section itself. This experience was now to serve the 
South when, having advanced toward unity by the spread of slavery 
into the interior, it found itself as a section in the same relation to 
the Union as a whole which the slaveholding tide-water area had 
held toward the more populous up-country of the South itself. 

The unification of the section is one of the most important 
features of the period. Not only had the South been divided into 
opposing areas, as we have seen, Init even its population was far 
from homogeneous. By the time of this decade, however, English, 

^Alexandria Herald, June lo and i,?, 1825. 

2 Calhoun, Works, I. 401-406: Schaper, "Sectionalism and Rcprcsenlatiun 
in South Carolina," 434-437- 

^Proceedings and Debates of the J'irginia Stale Convention. iSjq-iS^^o: 
J. A. C. Chandler, Representation in J'irginia. Johns Hopkins University Studies, 
XIV. 286-298. 



564 ^-J' Turner 

French Huguenots, Scotch-Irish, and Germans had become assimi- 
lated into one people ; and the negroes, who by the close of the 
decade numbered over a million and a half in a white population of 
less than two millions, were diffusing themselves throughout the 
section. Contemporaneously the pioneer farming type of the in- 
terior was undergoing replacement by the planter type. This was 
largely a change in economic and social life, rather than a replace- 
ment of people. 

As cotton-planting and slaveholding advanced into the in- 
terior counties of the old southern states, the free farmers were 
obliged either to change to the plantation economy and purchase 
slaves, or to sell their lands and migrate. Large numbers of them, 
particularly in the Carolinas, were Quakers or Baptists, whose reli- 
gious scruples combined with their agricultural habits to make this 
change obnoxious. This upland country, too distant from the sea- 
shore to permit a satisfactory market, had been a hive from which 
pioneers had passed into Kentucky and Tennessee, until those states 
became populous commonwealths. Now the exodus was increased 
by this later colonization.^ The Ohio was crossed, the Missouri 
ascended, and the streams that flowed to the Gulf were followed by 
movers away from the regions that were undergoing this social and 
economic reconstruction. This industrial revolution was effective in 
different degrees in the different states. Comparatively few of Vir- 
ginia's slaves, which by 1830 numbered nearly half a million 
(or about forty per cent, of the population), were found in 
her trans-Allegheny counties, but the Shenandoah Valley was re- 
ceiving slaves and changing to the plantation type. In North 
Carolina the slave population of nearly two hundred and fifty 
thousand (over thirt}-five per cent, of the population) at the 
same date had spread well into the interior, but cotton did not 
achieve the position there which it held farther soath. The in- 
terior farmers worked small farms of wheat and corn, laboring 
side by side with their negro slaves in the fields.^ South Carolina 
had over three hundred thousand slaves, more than a majority of her 
population ; and the black belt had extended to the interior. Geor- 
gia's slaves, amounting to over two hundred thousand, some- 

' Turner, "The Colonization of the West", in American Historical Re- 
view, XI. 307-309, 316-317; J. S. Bassett, Anti-slavery Leaders of North 
Carolina, Johns Hopkins University Studies, XVI. 267-271 ; D. A. Tompkins, 
History of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina (Charlotte, N. C, 1903), 
I. 99, 117; S. A. [0']Ferrall, Ramble through the United States (London, 
1832), 167; History of McLean County, Illinois (Chicago, 1879), 329; Personal 
Recollections of John M. Palmer (Cincinnati, 1901), 9; Schaper, loc. cit., 393. 

^J. S. Bassett, Slavery in the State of North Carolina, Johns Hopkins 
University Studies, XVII. 324, 399. 



The South, /S20-1SJO 565 

what less tlian half her population, had steadily advanced from the 
coast and the Savannah River toward the cotton lands of the interior, 
pushing before them the less prosperous farmers, who found new 
homes to the north or south of the cotton belt or migrated to the 
southwestern frontier.^ Here, as in Xorth Carolina, the planters in 
the interior of the state frequently followed the plow or encouraged 
their slaves by wielding the hoe.- 

Thus this process of economic transformation passed from the 
coast toward the mountain barrier, gradually eliminating the inhar- 
monious elements and steadily tending to produce a solidarity of in- 
terests. The South as a whole was becoming, for the first time since 
colonial days, a staple-producing region ; and, as diversified farming 
declined, the region tended to become dependent for its supplies of 
meat products, horses, and mules, and even of hay and cereals, upon 
the North and West. 

The westward migration of its people checked the growth of the 
South. It was colonizing the new West at the same time that the 
Middle Region was rapidly growing in population ; and the result 
was that the proud states of the southern seaboard were reduced to 
numerical inferiority. Like New England, the South was an almost 
stationary section. From 1820 to 1830 the states of this group 
gained little more than half a million souls, hardly more than the in- 
crease of the single state of New York. Virginia, with a population 
of over a million, increased but 13.7 per cent., and the Carolinas only 
15.5 per cent. In the next decade (1830-1840) these tendencies 
were even more clearly shown, for Virginia and the Carolinas then 
gained but little more than two per cent. Georgia alone showed 
rapid increase. At the beginning of the decade (1820-1830) the In- 
dians still held all of the territory west of Macon, at the centre of 
the state, with the exception of two tiers of counties along the south- 
ern border ; and when these lands were opened to settlement toward 
the close of the decade, they were occupied by a rush of settlement 
similar to the occupation of Oklahoma and Indian Territory in our 
own day. What Maine was to New England, that Georgia was to 
the southern seaboard, with the difference that it was deeply touched 
by influences more characteristically western. Because of the traits 
of her leaders and the rude aggressive policy of her people, Georgia 
belonged at least as much to the West as to the South. Erom 
colonial times the settlers in Georgia had been engaged in an almost 

' Phillips, loc. cit., io6. 
" Ibtd., 107. 



566 F.J. Tiirnei'- 

incessant struggle against the savages on her border, and they had 
the instincts of a frontier society.^ 

From 1800 to 1830 there were clear evidences of decline through- 
out the tide-water region. As the movement of capital and popula- 
tion toward the interior continued, wealth was drained from the 
coast ; and as time went on, the competition of the fertile and low- 
priced lands of the Gulf Basin proved too strong for the outworn 
lands even of the interior of the South. Under the wasteful system 
of tobacco and cotton culture, without replenishment of the soil, the 
staple areas would in any case have declined in value. Even the 
corn- and wheatlands were exhausted by unscientific farming.^ 
Writing in 1814 to Josiah Quincy,^ John Randolph of Roanoke 
lamented the decline of the seaboard planters. He declared that the 
region was now sunk in obscurity ; what enterprise or capital there 
was in the country had retired westward ; deer and wild turkeys 
were not so plentiful anywhere in Kentucky as near the site of the 
ancient Virginia capital, Williamsburg. In the Virginia convention 
•of 1829 Mr. Alercer estimated that in 1817 land values in Virginia 
aggregated two hundred and six million dollars, and negroes aver- 
aged three hundred dollars; while in 1829 the land values did not 
surpass ninety millions, and slaves had fallen in value to one hundred 
and fifty dollars. In a speech in the Virginia House of Delegates 
in 1832 Thomas Marshall^ asserted that the whole agricultural 
product of Virginia did not exceed in value the exports of eighty 
or ninety years before, when it contained not one-sixth of the popu- 
lation. In his judgment, the greater proportion of the larger planta- 
tions, with from fifty to one hundred slaves, brought the proprietors 
into debt ; and rarely did a plantation yield one and a half per cent, 
profit on the capital. So great had become the depression that 
Randolph prophesied that the time was coming when the masters 
would run away from the slaves and be advertised by them in the 
public papers." 

^ Phillips, \oc. cit., 88 ; A. B. Longstreet, Georgia Scenes (New York, 1840) ; G. R. 
Gilmer, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia (New York, 
1855) ; Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, VIII. 443 et seqq. 

2 C. W. Gooch, " Prize Essay on Agriculture in Virginia ", in Lynchburg 
Virginian, July 4, 1833; Martin, Gazetteer of Virginia, 99-100. 

^ Edmund Quincy, Life of Josiah Quincy, 353. 

* Proceedings of Virginia Convention, 1829-1830, 178; Winfield H. Collins, 
The Domestic Slave Trade of the Southern States (New York, 1904). 26. 

^ Ibid., 24, cited from Richmond Enquirer, February 2, 1832; B. W. Arnold, 
History of the Tobacco Industry in Virginia from i860 to 1894, Johns Hopkins 
University Studies, XV. 

6 Collins, loc. cit., 26. 



The South, 1S20-1SJO 567 

It was in this period that Thomas Jefferson fell into such financial 
embarrassments that he was obliged to request of the legislature of 
\'irginia permission to dispose of property by lottery to pay his 
debts, and that a subscription was taken up to relieve his distress.' 
At the same time Madison, having vainly tried to get a loan from the 
United States Bank, was forced to dispose of some of his lands and 
stocks ; and Monroe at the close of his term of office found himself 
financially ruined. He gave up Oak Hill, and spent his declining 
years with his son-in-law in New York City.- The old-time tide- 
water mansions, where in an earlier day everybody kept open house, 
gradually fell into decay. 

Sad indeed was the spectacle of Virginia's ancient aristocracy. 
It had never been a luxurious society. The very wealthy planters, 
wath vast cultivated estates and pretentious homes, were verv 
few. For the most part, the houses were moderate structures, 
set at intervals of a mile or so apart, often in park-like grounds, 
with long avenues of trees. The plantation was a little world in 
itself. Here was made much of the clothing for the slaves, and 
the mistress of the plantation supervised the spinning and weav- 
ing. Leather was tanned on the place : and blacksmithing, wood- 
working, and other industries were carried on, often under the 
direction of white mechanics. The planter and his wife commonly 
had the care of the black families which they owned, looked after 
them when they were sick, saw to their daily rations, arranged mar- 
riages, and determined the daily tasks of the plantation. The abun- 
dant hospitality between neighbors gave opportunity for social culti- 
vation, and politics was a favorite subject of conversation. 

The leading planters served as justices of the peace, but thev 
were not dependent for their selection upon the popular vote. Ap- 
pointed by the governor on nomination of the court itself, thev con- 
stituted a kind of close corporation, exercising local judicial, legisla- 
tive, and executive functions. The sheriff was appointed bv the 
governor from three justices of the peace recommended by the court, 
and the court itself appointed the county clerk. Thus the county 
government of \irginia was distinctly ari.stucratic. Countv-court 
day served as an opportunity for bringing together the freeholders, 
who included, not only the larger planters, but the small farmers and 
the poor whites — hangers-on of the greater plantations. Almost 
no large cities were found in Virginia. The court-house was hardly 
more than a meeting-place for the rural population. Here farmers 

> H. S. Randall. Life of Jefferson. III. 527, 561. 
^ Gaillard Hunt, Life of Madison. 380. 



568 ^-J- Turner 

exchanged their goods, traded horses, often fought, and Hstened t-i 
the stump speeches of the orators/ 

Such were, in the main, the characteristics of that homespun 
plantation aristocracy which, through the Virginia dynasty, had 
ruled the nation in the days of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, 
and Monroe. As their lands declined in value, they naturally sought 
for an explanation and a remedy.^ The explanation was found most 
commonly in the charge that the protective tariff was destroying the 
prosperity of the South ; and in reaction they turned to demand the 
old days of Jeffersonian rural simplicity under the guardianship of 
state rights and a strict construction of the Constitution. Madison 
in vain laid the fall in land values in Virginia to the uncertainty and 
low prices of the crops and to the attractions of the cheaper and 
better lands beyond the mountains.'^ 

Others emphasized the fact that the semiannual migration toward 
the west and southwest swept off enterprising portions of the people 
and much of the capital and movable property of the state, and 
kept down the price of land by the great quantities which the movers 
threw into the market. Instead of applying a system of scientific 
farming and replenishment of the soil, there was a tendency for the 
planters who remained to get into debt in order to add to their 
possessions the farms offered for sale by the movers. Thus there 
was a flow of money toward the west to pay for these new purchases. 
The overgrown plantations soon began to look tattered and almost 
desolate. " Galled and gullied hillsides and sedgey, briery fields " * 
showed themselves in every direction. Finally the planter found 
himself obliged to part with some of his slaves in response to the 
demand from the new cotton-fields, or to migrate himself, with his 
caravan t)f negroes, to open a new home in the Gulf Region. Dur- 
ing the period of this survey, the price for prime field-hands in 
Georgia averaged a little over seven hundred dollars.'^ If the esti- 
mate of one hundred and fifty dollars for negroes sold in family lots 
in Virginia is correct, it is clear that economic law would bring about 
a condition where Virginia's resources would in part depend upon 
her supply of slaves to the cotton belt.^ It is clear also that the Old 
Dominion had passed the apogee of her political power. 

' Thomas Cary Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabncy 
(Richmond, 1903), 14-24; Susan D. Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter 
(Baltimore, 1887), 34-3;. 

^ Randall, Jefferson, III. 532. 

'^Letters and Other Writings of Madison, III. 614. 

* Lynchburg Virginian, July 4, 1833. 

5 Phillips, in Political Science Quarterly, XX. 267. 

6 Collins, Domestic Slave Trade, 42-46. 



1 he South, iS 20-/8 JO 569 

It was not only the planters of Virginia that suffered in this 
period of change. As the more extensive and fertile cotton-fields of 
the new states of the Southwest opened, North Carolina, and even 
South Carolina, found themselves embarrassed. With the fall in 
cotton prices, already mentioned, it became increasingly necessary 
to possess the advantages of large estates and unexhausted soils, in 
order to extract a profit from this cultivation. From South Caro- 
lina there came a protest more vehement and aggressive than that of 
the discontented classes of Virginia. Already the indigo planta- 
tion had ceased to be profitable, and the rice-planters no longer held 
their old prosperity. 

Charleston was peculiarly suited to lead in a movement of revolt. 
It was the one important centre of real city life of the seaboard 
south of Baltimore. Here every February the planters gathered 
from their plantations, thirty to one hundred and fifty miles away, 
for a month in their town houses. At this season races, social 
gaieties, and political conferences vied w'ith each other in engaging 
their attention. Returning to their plantations in the early spring, 
they remained until Jtme, when considerations of health compelled 
them either again to return to the city, to visit the mountains, or to 
go to such watering-places as Saratoga, in New York. Here again 
they talked politics and mingled wMth political leaders of the North. 
It was not until fall that they were able to return again to their 
estates.^ Thus South Carolina, affording a combination of planta- 
tion life with the social intercourse of the city, gave peculiar oppor- 
tunities for exchanging ideas and consolidating the settlement of her 
leaders. 

The condition of South Carolina was doubtless exaggerated by 
Havnc of South Carolina in his speech in the Senate in 1832, when 
he characterized it as " not merely one of unexampled depression, 
but of great and all-pervading distress ", with " the mournful evi- 
dence of premature decay ", " merchants bankrupt or driven away — 
their capital sunk or transferred to other pursuits — our shipyards 
broken up — our ships all sold ! " " If ", said he, " w^e fly from the 
city to the country, what do we there behold ? Fields abandoned ; 
the hospitable mansions of our fathers deserted ; agriculture droop- 
ing; our slaves, like their masters, working harder, and faring 
worse ; the planter striving with unavailing eflTorts to avert the ruin 
which is before him." He drew a sad picture 01 the " once thriving 
planter reduced to despair, . . . gathering up the small remnants of 
his broken fortune, and. with his wife and his little ones, tearing him- 
self from the scenes of his childhood, and the bones of his ancestors, 

'A. Hodgson, Letters from North Aiucrica (London, 1824), I. 50. 



57© F-J- Turner 

to seek, in the wilderness, that reward for his industry, of which " 
the poHcy of Congress had deprived him.^ 

The genius of the South expressed itself most clearly in the field 
of politics. If the democratic Middle Region could show a multi- 
tude of clever politicians, the aristocratic South possessed an abun- 
dance of leaders bold in political initiative and masterful in their 
ability to use the talents of their Northern allies. When the Mis- 
souri question was debated, John Quincy Adams remarked " that if 
institutions are to be judged by their results in the composition of the 
councils of this Union, the slave-holders are much more ably repre- 
sented than the simple freemen ".- 

The Southern statesmen fall into two classes. On the one side 
was the \^irginia group, now for the most part old men, rich in the 
honors of the nation, still influential through their advice, but no 
longer directing party policy. Jefferson and Madison were in re- 
tirement in their old age ; Marshall as chief justice was continuing 
his career as the expounder of the Constitution in accordance with 
Federalist ideals. John Randolph, his old eccentricities increased 
by disease and intemperance, remained to proclaim the extreme doc- 
trines of Southern dissent and to impale his adversaries with javelins 
of flashing wit. A maker of phrases which stung and festered, he 
was capable of influencing public opinion somewhat in the same way 
as are the cartoonists of modern times. But " his course through 
life had been like that of the arrow which Alcestes shot to heaven, 
which efifected nothing useful, though it left a long stream of light 
behind it."^ In North Carolina, the venerable Macon remained to 
protest like a later Cato against the tendencies of the times, and to 
raise a warning voice to his fellow-slaveholders against national 
consolidation. 

But in the course of this decade the effective leadership of the 
South fell to Calhoun of South Carolina and Crawford of Georgia. 
Calhoun came from that Scotch-Irish Presbyterian stock that occu- 
pied the uplands of the South in the middle of the eighteenth century. 
The family lived on the Indian-fighting frontier of the Carolinas, 
whence Boone, Robertson, and Andrew Jackson crossed the moun- 
tains to Kentucky and Tennessee. Remaining behind, the Calhouns 
underwent the transformation of their section. At the close of the 
War of 1812 John C. Calhoun was the rival of Henry Clay in the 
championship of nationalistic legislation ; the antagonist of a " low, 

^Register of Debates, VIII., part i. 80-81 ; cf. David F. Houston, A Critical 
Study of Nullification in South Carolina (Harvard Historical Studies, vol. 3, 
1896), 46-47. 

* Memoirs, IV. 506. 

^Lynchburg Virginian, May 9, 1833. 



The South, iS20-iSjo 571 

sordid, selfish, and sectional spirit " ; the painter of the vision of a 
great organic nation, every part responsive to the other, sacrificing 
local interests for the good of the whole. > In those days of his 
fascinating and ardent young manhood^ he impressed his hearers as 
an extremist, a man with a tendency to rash speculation and novelty. 
This philosophical trait of his mind was inherent, not a development 
of his later sectional attitude. To whatever cause he supported he 
brought the tendency to draw the last logical deduction; to set 
boldly forth the complete conclusions. Senator Mills of Massachu- 
setts characterized him about 1823 in these words:' 

He is ardent, persevering, industrious, and temperate, of great ac- 
tivity and quickness of perception, and rapidity of utterance; as a poli- 
tician, too theorizing, speculative, and metaphysical,— magnificent in his 
views of the powers and capacities of the government, and of the virtue 
intelligence, and wisdom of the people. He is in favor of elevating' 
cherishing, and increasing all the institutions of the government and 
of a vigorous and energetic administration of it. From his rapidity of 
thought, he is often wrong in his conclusions, and his theories are some- 
times wild, extravagant, and impractical. He has alwavs claimed to be 
and IS, of the Democratic party, but of a very different class from that 
of Crawford; more like Adams, and his schemes are sometimes de- 
nounced by his party as ultra-fanatical. 

Another, writing of the same early period of Calhoun's career, 
declared : 

He wants, I think, consistency and perseverance of mind, and seems 
incapable of long continued and patient investigation. What he does 
not see at the first examination, he seldom takes pains to search for • but 
still the lightning glance of his mind, and the rapiditv with which he 
analyzes, never fail to furnish him with all that mav be necessary for 
his immediate purposes. In his legislative career, which, though short 
was uncommonly luminous, his love of novelty, and his apparent solici- 
tude to astonish were so great, that he has occasionally been known to 
go beyond even the dreams of political visionaries, and to propose 
schemes which were in their nature impracticable or injurious, and 
which he seemed to offer merely for the purpose of displaying the 
affluence of his mind, and the fertility of his ingenuity. 

William Wirt said in 1824 r'' 

Calhoun advised me the other day to study less and trust more to 

genius ; and I believe the advice is sound. He has certainly practised on 

' Speech on the Bonus Bill, Annals of Congress. 14 Cong., 2 Sess.. 853-855 

2 A. Hodgson, Letters from North America, I. 80 ; Atlantic Monthly XXVI 

337-338. ' ' ' 

'^Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1881-1882), XI.X 37 
« Quoted by A. Hodgson, Letters from North America, I. 81. These letters 
were published as early as 1824. 

"John P. Kennedy, Memoirs of the Life of William IVirt (Philadelphia, 
1849), n. 164; cf. Adams. Memoirs, V. 361. 

AM. HIST. RKV., vol.. XI.— 38. 



572 F-J- Turner 

his own precepts and has become, justly, a distinguished man. It may 
do very well in politics, where a proposition has only to be compared 
with general principles with which the politician is familiar. 

Played upon by the forces of economic change w-ithin his section, 
Calhoun toward the end of the decade reluctantly yielded to the 
sectional interests of South Carolina, and in 1828 he framed, in 
the South Carolina Exposition, the first classical statement of the 
defense of the section against the nation, fashioning the fragments of 
state-sovereignty doctrine into the nullification argument, and find- 
ing in the domestic experience of South Carolina herself the his- 
torical basis for his theory of the defense of a minority area against 
the majority.^ But even in 1828 he refrained from making public 
either his authorship of the Exposition or his adherence to nulli- 
fication, 

Crawford also reflected, though in a different way, the processes 
of sectional change which passed over the South. A Georgian, of 
V^irginia birth, he was an astute, moderate, skilful politician. Un- 
polished and even coarse in his manners, he had a strong, vigorous 
mind, and power over men, and a capacity for making combinations 
and organizing a following. In his earlier career he had incurred 
the charge of Federalism, upheld the doctrine of implied powers, and 
denied the right of the state to resist the laws of Congress, except 
bv changing its representation, or by appealing to the sword under 
the right of revolution. He almost won the nomination for the 
presidency against Monroe in 18 16, and while a member of Monroe's 
cabinet he incurred the charge of intrigue against the administra- 
tion, and of building up a personal following by the use of patronage. 
How much of this charge was due to the envy and jealousy of his 
rivals (from whom the estimates of his character must principally 
be drawn) need not here be decided. The important fact is that 
around the Georgian gathered friends of state sovereignty and the 
slaveholding interest. Little by little he found himself, with all his 
love of moderation and his expediency, forced by the tendency of 
his state to take a sectional position, and in consequence to lose an 
important part of his following as a national statesman. The Geor- 
gians, less speculative than the South-Carolinians, were fully as 
firm in their determination to secure the legislation essential for the 
interests of their state and for the cotton area. These forces drove 
him from his policy of temporizing on the tarifif and internal im- 
provements. 

The lesser leaders of his state (like Cobb, Forsyth, and Troup) 
deprived him — as the lesser leaders of South Carolina (Hayne, 

'Calhoun, Works (ed. R. K. Cralle, 1851), I. 402 405. 



The South, 1S20-1SJO 573 

Hamilton, McDufifie, William Smith, Turnbull, and the rest) de- 
prived Calhoun — of the opportunity to hold a national following, and 
puslVed the two greater statesmen on in a sectional road which their 
own caution and personal ambitions made them reluctant to tread. 

Nor must it be forgotten that early in the decade the South lost 
two of her ablest political leaders, the wise and moderate Lowndes 
of South Carolina, and William Pinkncy, the l)rilliant Maryland 
orator. 

Thus in these ten years the influence of economic change within 
this section transformed the South-Carolinians from warm sup- 
porters of a liberal national policy into the straitest of the sect of 
state-sovereignty advocates, intent upon raising barriers against 
the flood of nationalism that threatened to overwhelm the South. 
Virginia, divided by internal dissensions between the interior and 
the older counties and suffering from the decline of her economic 
power, saw the sceptre pass to the cotton-raising states, which gave 
to her doctrines of state sovereignty a new and drastic utterance, 
and made of them no academic theory, but a plan of action. 

No better illustration of the influence of economic interests upon 
political ideas can be found than in the history of cotton culture and 
slavery in these important years. The price of cotton fell as produc- 
tion increased. In 1816 the average price of middling uplands in 
New York was thirty cents, and South Carolina's leaders favored 
the tariff; in 1820 it was seventeen cents, and the South saw in 
the protective system.a grievance; in 1824 it was fourteen and three- 
quarters cents, and the South-Carolinians denounced the tariff as 
unconstitutional; when the woolens bill was agitated in 1827, cotton 
had fallen to but little more than nine cents, and the radicals of the 
section threatened civil war. Then it was that Calhoun gave his 
casting vote against the tariff of 1827, and strove to tide over the 
storm by the device of nullification. Sectional economic interests 
had dominated the political philosophy of the greatest Southern 
statesman since Jefferson, and the South had entered on the long 
struggle that culminated in the Civil War. 

Frederick J. Turner. 



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